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Critical Media Literacy and Video Games
Student Projects Several of my students have duplicated Dietz's (1998) research, attempting to show that things have improved or that Dietz was wrong. Sara, for example, set out to show that things have changed since Dietz's study by replicating her research with current data. Daniel incorporated an audience awareness element to his project, adding a case study of a female gamer in addition to following Dietz's rubric. Bill refocused his study more firmly on the actual players by developing case studies of five gamers and their perceptions of race and ethnicity in the games they typically played. These three projects, completed over the span of three subsequent years, illustrate the various ways in which students can critique and extend empirical research in new media. Sara Ebensperger: Content Analysis of Gender During the winter of 2003, Sara replicated Dietz's study in an attempt to show, as she confided, that the representation of women in video games has improved since 1996. While Sara felt that Dietz's sampling and coding methods were relatively sound, she hoped that if she were to reproduce Dietz's study, she would be able to show that the representation of women in video games had improved from 1996 to 2003 – a large span of time in the history of the industry. Sara began by selecting a smaller sample of Sony PlayStation 2 video games – the 10 top-selling games of January 2003 listed on the Blockbuster web site:
Sara rented each game, read the manual for each, and played each game, using a coding rubric similar to Dietz’s: no human characters, men but no women, women as prizes, women as victims, women as sex objects, women as heroines. Using Dietz's coding rubric, she evaluated the 10 games and was surprised to find that her results were not significantly different from Dietz’s. In Sara’s findings, 40% of the games had no female characters. Of the remaining games, only two (20% of the total) had women as heroines (Yu-Gi-Oh! & Dragon Ball Z), whereas four (40% of the total) had women as sex symbols (GTA, 007, The Sims, & WWE). Two of those presented women as victims (GTA & 007). Sara included detailed descriptions of the roles of women in each game to clarify her classifications. Sara concludes that the representation of women had not significantly changed since Dietz's study: "The representation of them in these games though, show that, while it would be nice for times to have changed, it looks like things are pretty much the same." In her discussion of the results, Sara speculated that the sample may have been too small to produce results that reflect the industry, suggesting that there are games on the market that have positive representations of women in them. Daniel Doyen: Content Analysis of Gender and Case Study In the Winter of 2004, Daniel was particularly engaged in the discussion of Dietz's findings, feeling her methodology to be suspect. He also criticized Sara’s sampling methods and pointed out that neither Dietz nor Sara had looked closely at the relationship between females as characters and females as gamers. Daniel developed his own sampling method, but also proposed to include case studies of female gamers. For his sample, Daniel selected the 20 most popular games for PlayStation2 ranked on http://www.gamerankings.com rather than the 33 multi-platform games selected by Dietz.
Daniel described his findings as "drastically different" from Dietz's findings in terms of including women characters in video games, as well as being able to choose female characters as the protagonist. Only three of the twenty games (15%) had no female characters at all. Dan also found "an abundance of actively heroic characters" who were women. Eleven of the games (55%) included a woman or women as "main action heroes." He noted that games such as Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty featured strong female characters such as Fortune, who saves the lives of others at the cost of her own. Virtual Fighter 4: Evolution, Soul Calibur 2, and Twisted Metal Black all include females among the choices of characters: “Many of the characters are women, and the women are just as powerful as the male characters.” Daniel did note that there are often fewer female characters to choose from than males. In some sports games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour series, “female golfers can be chosen, although the strength of their swing is often less than that of their male counterparts.” Finally, Daniel noted that “in the games in which you do not choose your main character, such as Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Devil May Cry there is not a single instance of the player’s character being a female.” In terms of victimized women, Daniel did find comparable results to Dietz's research. Among the 20 games, five (25%) included women as victims. In Dietz's study, the rate was 21%. Daniel also found similar results for women as villains, and women as objects. Daniel concluded from his content analysis that progress has been made, even if there is still much more to be done: "Representation of women in video games has come a ways since the 16-bit era, and while it seems that there is still progress to make, it should be known that the progress is possible." One aspect of Daniel study that differed from Sara’s and from the Dietz study is that Daniel included an audience analysis element. Although Daniel originally proposed to develop case studies of three female gamers, he was only able to locate one – a college-aged white female active in the gaming community. He interviewed her, asking about her gaming practices and attitudes toward representation of women in video games. His results were mixed, although she did express frustration with negative portrayals of women. When asked about games with no female presence, for example, she responded that she did not mind in games without clearly gendered characters in general such as Ratchet and Clank; however, she was concerned with sports games that lacked female characters because, she felt, "the fact that they only feature males is reminiscent of the pre-women’s rights movement." Daniel wrote that "She was disgusted at the fact that the only females featured in the games were busty cheerleaders, although she did say that the actual broadcasts of the sports in reality aren’t much better." Daniel’s subject stated her belief that "females deserve equal representation in sports games, as they deserve in real sports. Daniel presented his subject with the results from his own study and reported that she was skeptical about his findings that women are more equitably represented as heroes and action characters. She thought that games like Soul Calibur II were far from equal: “the female characters were less frequent than the male characters, and often fell prey to being weaker (albeit quicker) than the male characters.” While the industry had certainly progressed over the past decade, she speculated, it was far from equal. Daniel’s project is a good example of a research study that combines media analysis with audience analysis. Daniel builds on his empirical findings in terms of coding and analyzing the screen itself, with the reflections of a gamer with a vested interest in the project. In this sense, Daniel is not only examining the state of the media itself, but how it is used and how it impacts those who engage with it. William Minor: Ethnography of Race and Video Games In the winter of 2005, William ("Bill") developed his own project to contribute new information to the debate about representation of race and ethnicity in video games. In his review of research, Bill examined not only Dietz, but a number of other significant studies that examined both gender and ethnicity, such as Glaubke, Miller, Parker, and Espejo (2002), who found that "African American females were far more likely than any other group to be victims of violence." Bill sought to examine critically the proposition by Leonard (2003) that video games perpetuate racial inequality--for example, that Grand Theft Auto III "legitimizes white supremacy and patriarchy and privileges." Rather than completing a content analysis of popular videos, Bill chose five subjects as case subjects in order to track the games that subjects actually play and their attitudes toward the representation of race in those games. His subjects included a 14-year-old Black male, an 18-year-old Black male, a 21-year-old Black male, a 25-year-old White male, and a 30-year-old White female. On average, the subjects gamed from 1 to 5 hours a day, and between 5 and 15 hours a week. Bill asked each subject to track his or her gaming habits over a span of four weeks, listing each game they played and making notes about the perceived racial traits of the game characters. In his interviews with the subjects, Bill found that the White subjects and Black subjects perceived race in distinctly different ways: "The African American gamers all stated in separate interviews that the racial makeup of the games was consistent with what the media portrays on television. The Caucasian gamers stated that they did not pay attention to the race of the characters." Bill concluded that while there are stereotypical racial representations in first-person shooter games, there is more equitable racial representation in sports games. He found that
In contrast, first person shooter games such as Grand Theft Auto III had the most stereotypical and negative portrayals of race and gender: "GTA has the most racially charged plot with African Americans, Asians and Latino characters playing the violent criminals and acting in very stereotypical ways." Bill also noted that Grand Theft Auto included misogynistic representations of women: "Women in the game are prostitutes who are to be used and then discarded or killed. In fact, the gamer receives points (energy) from using the women." Bill found that Black male characters in Grand Theft Auto were the most blatantly stereotypical:
Excluding games such as Grand Theft Auto, Bill's findings indicate that the representation of race may not be as stereotypical as we might expect in video games in general. Sporting games in particular, especially those by producers such as EA Sports include a wide degree of diversity. The most compelling part of Bill’s project is that he examines how real players engage with the game and what they think about the representation of ethnicity. His results call on future students to look more closely at how race is perceived by those who actually play the games, based on the games they play and the characters that they choose. What choices do gamers have when it comes to race and gender, and which characters do they choose and why? Why might a 12-year-old White male, for example, choose to construct a 20-something, punk-rock, African-American female as a skater character in Tony Hawk? Bill’s project and results call on researchers to examine more closely the attitudes and choices of actual gamers themselves in relation to the ethnicity of video game characters. All three of these student projects demonstrate the variety of approaches that students can take toward new media such as video games: Sara replicates a content analysis study using new data; Daniel adds an audience-analysis component; Bill builds his project around the actual behavior of players. Each of these students is honing his or her critical literacy skills and constructing new knowledge through inquiry-based research into new media. Home | Abstract | Introduction | Methodology | Student Projects | Conclusion | References
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